Abstract

Genres written by students have received significant attention due to its diversity of functions in subject learning. Thus, the present article is framed within the study field of academic genres in Spanish. The aim of this research is to identify, define and characterize genres of the 'technical report' family to understand its educational role in civil engineering and in the processes of professional-academic literacy in this field. The study adopts a qualitative approach, specifically from the discourse genre theory and explores the technical report macrogenre in computer science civil engineering (MGITEC, for its acronym in Spanish) in the student corpus HELICE-2017. This genre family is highly relevant in the academic discourse of civil engineering and in the subdiscipline computer science. Results of the text corpus analysis reveal a great diversity of genre resources used in this community of practice. In consequence, a continuum of discourse genres was identified based on the collected data, from reports of academic insertion to reports of professional context. Different types of reports are displayed in this continuum. These reports meet relevant educational purposes when it comes to using analytical, critical and creative thinking for problem solving: the raison d'etre of engineering. Finally, this piece of research makes it possible to define relations between genres in the academic writing of reports and to provide didactic strategies for subject literacy in engineering.